Discover Songs & Listen To Your Own Music Collection With Legato For iPhone

exfm and MusicBunk are great music discovery tools but a lot of effort goes into organizing and collecting songs in your local collection, and it seems a bit of a waste to rely solely on online streaming to get your daily dosage of music. Legato is a new iPhone app that is part music player, part music discovery tool. You can view a list of songs that have been played by your friends from their iPhone collection, or just let the world know what your favorite song is these days, simply by playing it in the Legato music player. The songs you discover using the app can be previewed and purchased, and users can also leave feedback on them, thanks to the Legato rating system.

You need to create an account with the service in order to use Legato ; just specify your email address and pick a username as well as a password. Since Legato is meant to be used to view suggestions from your friends, integration with other popular social networks would have gone well with it. In its current version, however, all you can do is ask your friends to start using Legato regularly, so that their favorite songs start showing up on your timeline.

Before getting to everything Legato can do about music discovery, let’s take a look at its playback features first. The player is simple, and comes with just three buttons. These include forward/next, rewind/previous and pause/play. The circular dial in the middle of the screen serves as a seek bar. To select songs to play from your local library, hit the note icon in the bottom-right. If you turn the ‘Automatically Post Songs’ option on from the app’s settings, everything you play in Legato shows up on the timeline of your followers.

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The great thing about Legato is that even if none of your friends are using it yet, downloading the app isn’t a complete waste. For one thing, you get a really cool-looking music player and secondly, you can still use its music discovery aspect some extent. Using the Legato Search bar, you can search for other users with public profiles that are worth following.

The songs played by everyone you follow show up on your Legato Timeline. Swipe across a song from right to left if you want to give it a star, or long-press it to get sharing options that include Twitter and Facebook. Tapping a post once brings up a menu housing options for purchasing the song, rating it or viewing details about its artist. If you already have the discovered song in the Music app, you can begin listening to it right from within Legato. Apart from hitting the artist name in a song’s entry, there is another way of viewing the most popular songs and artists on Legato – through the ‘Top Artists’ and ‘Top Songs’ sections located in the menu.

Legato is a free app, and optimized for iPhone/iPod touch. Give it a go by heading to the following link.